


tall thought-woven sails

by Fallwater023



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Child Soldiers, Erik's mind is a scary scary place guys, Espionage, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2482298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallwater023/pseuds/Fallwater023
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex's training was an exercise in losing power. Magneto offers him a chance to earn it back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tall thought-woven sails

**Author's Note:**

> Hoo boy. AU of an AU, I think. Erik didn't leave at Cuba, he and Charles have worked things out but still conflict ideologically because that headcanon is my life. Title from William Butler Yeats' "Rose of Battle", because I am a pretentious nutcase. 
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of child soldierhood/espionage, kinda canon-consistent and not graphic, but more honestly and openly discussed than in Alex Rider canon. Well, as openly as spies ever discuss anything.

_Rose of All Roses, Rose of All the World!_  
The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled  
Above the tide of hours, trouble the air,  
And God's bell buoyed to be the water's care...  
-William Butler Yeats, "The Rose of Battle"

Their newest addition was having trouble adjusting to life at the Mansion. In one of his fits of insanity, Charles thought it would be a good idea to sic Erik on him. 

Erik harbored no illusions about himself. He was not the comforting, inspirational, or understanding type. He was of the survivorship school of ‘kill it before it kills you’, one this Alex Rider seemed to have joined as well. It made Magneto’s chest hurt, and not in the middle-aged-soldier way it sometimes did on wet mornings, to know that nothing had really changed since he was in the field as a young man himself. To know that he’d given up so much to follow Charles, and it had still come to nothing. But that didn’t matter, life went on and the earth spun and this one, _this one_ was out of danger for now. Erik just had to make him realize that. 

He could do that. Survivor to survivor. 

Their problem child was sitting on one of the gargoyles - or rather, behind the gargoyle, in a little stone pocket perfectly sized and shaped to seat a sulky teenaged superspy. Erik turned off his peacetime eyes and turned on his ‘covert operative’ filter of hard-learned Mossad habits.

“Well-chosen,” he said, blithely startling the kid into showing the whites of his eyes. A little mystique would help his cause. “Defensible, concealed, multiple escape routes...I’d be hard-pressed to find a safer spot.” 

Rider stared at him a little longer, then put up his most charming mask. Erik knew what that one looked like from the inside. “Any pointers, then?” 

“Well,” Erik played for time, choosing his words carefully, “Probably the eaves of the library roof - more escape routes, less conspicuous than a gargoyle,” he grinned absently at Charles’s frustration over the loss of such a good opening. “Charles would want me to tell you that the safest place in the Mansion is with an adult, that if you want to open up there’s always someone to listen.” 

Rider let a pause weight the air before answering, “And what would you say?” 

“The library roof,” Erik answered deadpan. Rider snorted. “Frankly, I think Charles is going about this all wrong. But he’s the telepath, so he knows that and he keeps on doing it his way anyway. So there must be some piece of the puzzle he knows and I don’t.” 

“And you want me to, what, spill my guts after you’ve been so kind and obliging?” 

Erik rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t patronize me. You’re not the only person in the world who’s ever worked in the shadows. Charles seems to attract our type, I’ve no idea what it is about him.” 

“He’s awfully - ,” The boy started, then stopped. He didn’t bite his lip - too obvious - but his eyes flicked to check Erik’s, then away to scan the perimeter again. Good habit. Erik let the silence hang. Awkwardness was a spy’s best interrogation tool. “ - well. He’s very much _himself_ ,” Rider finished, looking satisfied with that statement. 

“And you and I,” Erik kept his eyes on Rider’s, as the boy watched his shoulders and hands, carefully propped on hips to telegraph every move, “We’ve been in the business of not being ourselves. It gets easier, doesn’t it, than being the real you? The soft you. The trusting one.” 

Rider wasn’t watching him anymore, he was rising, looking for escape routes. “Rider. _Alex_.” Erik said, and bucked some of that Mossad steel into his voice - not the hunting steel, that would make Alex feel more threatened. There was a certain timbre to which a less experienced agent would respond, if he had used their conversation right, if he’d set up their power dynamic properly. 

There was a suspended moment. 

And the gamble paid off - Alex resettled in his perch, wary, still poised to take off. “I’m not going to tell you this is a safe place where you can take off the masks. You and I both know, there is no such thing.” 

He held Alex’s eyes for a moment, not letting him look away, then walked out past him to stand on the decorative spur at the building’s corner. It was a fragile drop, precarious. If he were human, he would never trust his life to a mess of crumbling stone. But he was mutant - homo superior - and he never went anywhere without armor now. 

“Nonetheless,” he said to the open air, to the sky and the weak sunlight and the open green of Charles’s land, Charles’s territory, where he could fool himself sometimes into believing he was a softer kind of man. “You will learn, in time, that there are different levels of mask. And different kinds of mission.”

He could feel the teen clam up at that. “I told your psychic leader, I don’t _have_ a mission now. Just me,” 

“Exactly,” And now he spun and fixed Alex with his gaze again. “Your mission now is to learn. To take full advantage of this resource while it is present. You cannot do that while you are on infiltration protocols. While you are expecting attack from all sides,” Erik grinned, a poor imitation of one but it served his rhetorical point. “So, you have a conflict of your mission and your training. Charles looks at you and sees a scared child. I look at you and see an insufficiently flexible asset. Which of us is right?” 

Oh, did Alex ever need to work on his poker face. To be fair, the face was perfectly neutral - but he simply radiated injured pride. “I’ve been at schools where I was on mission alert. I managed.” 

Nobody had taught this baby operative the different qualities of mission. MI6 pigs. Like infants with a gun, pointing it blind and yanking the trigger. “Your mission in those schools was not to learn, your mission was to build a cover. Did you keep mission guard up in your field training?”

“Well, given that the SAS squad I was with wasn’t properly briefed and might’ve killed me if I gave them any sign of a foothold,” Alex snapped, and let Erik complete the sentence for himself. The pigs didn’t even train him right. They threw a child into fifteen different war zones and they didn’t even _train him right_. 

It never ceased to amaze him, how pure his anger could be sometime. How cold. He could step back, just like he was now, and admire the possible futures of Alex’s handlers. 

A metallokinetic mutation gave an assassin so - many - _options_. 

“I see,” he said, distantly aware that his voice was gentle. He was always at his most gentle when he was angry, it was - well, probably not how a person should work. But it was him, and he operated well enough. “So, Alex. It seems there is a choice to be made,” and now he was crossing over to the boy and squatting down to balance on his haunches, level with this child. 

Alex gave him an eloquent glance, the wordless communication of one spy to another in the field. And an honest question deserved an honest answer. “You have been ill-used, Alex, and left in a place between civilian and operative. And you know as well as I do - there is no back-tracking in this business. So you have a choice. I train you, and I train you fully, and I train you right, and you may have some measure of humanity back. Or I leave you to come up with your own solution,” 

“Sir?” after a weighty pause, that voice sounded half-hesitant, seeking. Not sure if he’d like the answer. 

“You’re an intelligent young man, Alex, and you have some promise. I expect that given time, and the benevolent oversight of our _psychic leader_ , you will develop and implement a solution of your own. Whether that solution works - whether you fully regain yourself, your direction - that is the real question,” 

He let the bottom drop out of the conversation at that. Let Alex mull it over. Then the boy drew breath to speak, and Erik almost rolled his eyes. 

“I - ,” 

“Stop,” Erik held up a hand to physically reinforce the order, and was pleased to see Alex comply. “I do not want your answer tonight. Weigh this decision. Give it your full attention. Tell me in the morning.”

And he left Alex to his thoughts. 

With any luck, the boy would realize the true stakes of this choice. Follow Erik, and have some certainty that he would possess Erik’s brand of control. Strike out on his own, and risk doing further harm to himself. Those were the surface stakes. Deeper was the question - could Alex, damaged by MI6, trust himself to another person, or would he refuse that connection. 

And deeper still - would Alex give over control of himself to a man he barely knew and trust that it would be given back, or would he make the wiser decision, and keep his mind in his own hands? 

Charles would not be pleased with his solution. Erik could feel the little liar pressing up against his mind, already starting to sour with disapproval at Erik’s handling of the situation. 

_Charles, you are not the expert on international espionage in this relationship. I am._

_Erik, you are impossible._

_Exactly._


End file.
